No Country for Women - Humanism, Secularism, Feminism

Taslima Nasreen

Taslima Nasreen, an award-winning writer, physician, secular humanist and human rights activist, is known for her powerful writings on women oppression and unflinching criticism of religion, despite forced exile and multiple fatwas calling for her death. In India, Bangladesh and abroad, Nasreen’s fiction, nonfiction, poetry and memoir have topped the best-seller’s list.

Taslima Nasreen was born in Bangladesh. She started writing when she was 13. Her writings won the hearts of people across the border and she landed with the prestigious literary award Ananda from India in 1992. Taslima won The Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought from the European Parliament in 1994. She received the Kurt Tucholsky Award from Swedish PEN, the Simone de Beauvoir Award and Human Rights Award from Government of France, Le Prix de l' Edit de Nantes from the city of Nantes, France, Academy prize from the Royal Academy of arts, science and literature from Belgium. She is a Humanist Laureate in The International Academy for Humanism,USA. She won Distinguished Humanist Award from International Humanist and Ethical Union, Free-thought Heroine award from Freedom From Religion foundation, USA., IBKA award, Germany,and Feminist Press Award, USA . She got the UNESCO Madanjeet Singh prize for Promotion of the Tolerance and Non-violence in 2005. She received the Medal of honor of Lyon. She got honorary citizenship from Paris, Nantes, Lyon, Metz, Thionville, Esch etc. Taslima was awarded the Condorcet-Aron Prize at the “Parliament of the French Community of Belgium” in Brussels and Ananda literary award again in 2000.

Bestowed with honorary doctorates from Gent University and UCL in Belgium, and American University of Paris and Paris Diderot University in France, she has addressed gatherings in major venues of the world like the European Parliament, National Assembly of France, Universities of Sorbonne, Oxford, Harvard, Yale, etc. She got fellowships as a research scholar at Harvard and New York Universities. She was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow in the USA in 2009.

Taslima has written 40 books in Bengali, which includes poetry, essays, novels and autobiography series. Her works have been translated in thirty different languages. Some of her books are banned in Bangladesh. Because of her thoughts and ideas she has been banned, blacklisted and banished from Bengal, both from Bangladesh and West Bengal part of India. She has been prevented by the authorities from returning to her country since 1994, and to West Bengal since 2007.

EVENTS

Forbidden Words

[Dwikhandito ( The life divided), the third part of my autobiography has been banned in Bangladesh since 2003. The book was also banned in West Bengal, India in 2003 but Kolkata high court lifted the ban on the book in 2005. The book is now free but heavily censored. The readers are still not allowed to read a few pages of the book . I was physically attacked by the Muslim fundamentalists for writing this book.

A price (unlimited amount of money) was set on my head. Here are the forbidden words! Translated from original Bengali.]

” …. I could not accept at all that the religion had ever brought any light to mankind. Religion had not spread anything other than darkness. Religion had grown out of ignorance and the fear of death. The monotheistic men had created religion for their own pleasure and to enjoy themselves in this life. Islamic history tells us that the Arabs used to live in caves and newborn girls were buried alive, and Muhammad ended all this misery. But I believe that more misery has been created after the advent of Islam. Previously, women were business people, they used to take part in wars, chose their own husbands and also divorced their husbands. Muhammad’s first wife Khadija was a businesswoman and Muhammad was her third husband and was also much younger than her. If girls were buried alive, then there would be fewer women in this world. The men used to marry more than one woman, but where did they find all these women? There would be scarcity of women if they were buried alive. But that did not happen. The Arabs used to pass their days in merriment and pleasure, they used to dine and drink well, they believed that there was no other life than this one and they used to enjoy themselves as much as possible in this world. Muhammad brought an avalanche upon this belief. He used the religion he created as a weapon to seize power. He killed people unhesitatingly, he bathed in the blood of members of other tribes, he brutally killed people of other religions, and he hoisted the flag of victory after invading Jewish areas with his own troops and looting their wealth and raping their women. This religion was never a spiritual one, it was a political one from beginning to end. He did not deprive himself of any earthly pleasures. He had done everything he wanted to do and he did it all in the name of Allah. After killing somebody, he said that he did it on the orders of Allah. Of course, he said at the outset that nobody can speak against the orders of Allah. Muhammad divided the hours of the night to spend time with his more than a dozen wives in the harem. He created a scene on the night he was due to spend with his wife Hafsa. Hafsa went to her father’s house that day but when she returned before the scheduled time, she found the bedroom door locked from inside. Why was the door shut? Who was in the room? Her husband, prophet Muhammad, the messenger of Allah, was in the room having sex with a slave girl called Maria. Hafsa was furious and told all the other wives about this. Muhammad, to hide his own guilt, dragged Allah down from the sky and said that he didn’t do it willingly, it was Allah’s will and he had only obeyed Allah’s orders, it was nothing more than that. There is a saying in Bengali, ‘The thief is bragging after stealing’. This episode was also like that. Far from being humble after doing wrong and without speaking to his wives in a subdued voice with his head bowed, he proclaimed a word of caution to his wives that Allah had told him, ‘If you divorce any of your wives, then Allah will provide more beautiful, more tolerant, more submissive, more shy and more trustworthy maidens or widows for you to marry’. Muhammad married his foster son’s wife Zainab and this time too he justified his misdeed by mentioning the name of Allah who, apparently, had told him to marry his daughter-in-law. Muhammad’s very young, beautiful and wise wife, Ayesha, said something excellent, ‘I see that your Lord always rushes to you to satisfy all your desires’. His friends used to look at Ayesha and Muhammad was very jealous of that so he put all his wives behind a curtain and gradually he ordered all women to cover themselves with an extra set of clothes. Islam is supposed to have given women much honour. Is this called honour! Allah’s resounding voice comes across the seven skies, ‘Men have the right to dominate over women, because Allah has created men as superior human beings to women and because men spend their money for women.’

What can I say! This is the character of the hypocrite known as our prophet and his hoax in the name of Allah. Millions of believers in this world are still keeping this religion alive but there is nothing behind it except the game of politics. Bangladesh is no exception. As his boat was sinking, President Ershad was desperately clinging on to Islam to find a port as he couldn’t find one any other way.

Comments

Do you consider any of the Sufi mystics to be genuinely spiritual? And what’s your opinion of Irshad Manji’s reform movement, and the effort to reinterpret/retranslate the Quran from a reformist perspective?

What does this mean, ‘spiritual’? Are they genuinely convinced that their god is real? Do they actually believe in the superstitions they’ve created? Do they really feel pleasure from participating in their prayers and rituals?

What difference does it make? It’s like asking if little kids are genuinely frightened when they tell ghost stories.

And what’s your opinion of Irshad Manji’s reform movement, and the effort to reinterpret/retranslate the Quran from a reformist perspective?

The goal should be to utterly reject evil and ignorance, not to try to patch it up with a new coat of paint.

Reform is better than nothing, and that Manji is doing something is good and commendable as far as it goes, but it’s like pouring perfume in a midden. Sure, it’s an improvement, but the better answer is to walk away and dig a well for fresh, clean water.

And reform is only potentially good and commendable as a short-term strategy. As a long-term strategy it is the opposite. This is because it must rely on the corrupt and evil foundation, which perpetuates and supports the existence of that foundation. Moderate, liberal faith is still gullible, superstitious, mendacious, wasteful, abusive, discriminatory, anti-intellectual, and distortive to our true potential.

(Apologies for the multiple posts. I keep going away and thinking of more I want to say.)

I read the associated notes that come with the reformist Quran (linked on Manji’s site I think). It started off well enough, reinterpreting the nasty bits of the Quran based on the assumption that it really is God’s word but that God is not an asshole. They reject the entire hadith, sunna, ijma and sharia as forgeries.

Then things go off the rails when they start claiming the Quran predicts Big Bang theory, teleportation etc., and that there is a secret code in there based on the number 19. Better than misogyny or beheading people for ‘witchcraft’, but crazy never the less.

When we truly leave our childhood behind we come to realise that we all have only one life and that in that life we all have very similar pleasures and pains, wants and desires. Those in the grip of childish fantasy are doomed to never filly realise their potential as human beings. The religious reformer is like one born blind but gaining sight as an adult through some operation. He cannot go back to his previous state of total darkness yet he is afraid of the brightness of the sun and so he is content to lurk in the shadows. Feeling lonely he says “Why don’t you all join me here?”

“when we leave our childhood behind” is indeed the turning point. Why, do you think, are so many people afraid to do that? They rebel against their own parents, but they clutch at the security of the great parent in the sky and the safety of being part of a herd of sheep, and so they never leave childhood behind.

Greta Christina was right. Diversity in the atheist community really is a virtue all its own.

I like the fact that you have such intimate experience with Islam, Taslima. I mean…I suppose I’d prefer that you didn’t…I wouldn’t wish the pains of Islam on any woman, (as one myself I feel a kind of prickly meanness emerge in my normally cheery personality when someone suggests to me that I “try out” religion – what an impoverished and unbelievably tactless solution to my problems!), but we all benefit from hearing from someone with so much more perspective. I cannot emphasize enough how I appreciate the inside look I get on this blog. Especially as a white twenty-year-old living in the United States – I have neither the life experience nor the cultural background to construct for myself even an approximation of the understanding of Islam you can. You paint such vivid pictures. And you have such poetic prose. And such direct experience. I don’t know, I just really like it. I feel like I learn a lot.

Thanks for publishing this, Taslima. Of course, I agree with you about Mohammed’s motives and actions; he was no better or worse than many other patriarchs. History shows us that men have turned out to be very poor rulers, and if we must have rulers, I would hope that women would do better, but maybe not. The ruling class of both genders is very self-serving and does not tolerate rebellion so I can see why they ran you out of town; the same thing has happened to women who rebelled against the male rulers in Christian societies. Sometimes they were burned at the stake. I guess that you and I are lucky that we still have our whole skins.

I wonder how so many people are attracted to Islam! Is it just the promise of a beautiful garden beneath which river flows in the after life for being faithful or the fear of hell or is there something really enlightening?

anyone who hates religion Islam is the devil success in its plan to deceive the human race, including you taslima, look for the real truth, I suggest you to see the series The Arrivals on youtube and see al quran